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This time of year usually gives you opportunity to look back on the last year and reflect, as look at where we are right now, as well as the future. So, I decided to do just that for Potteries Hackspace.

I trust you’ve all had plenty of turkey and enough drink to sink a small ship, but now all the kids are back to school it’s all back to normal.

The Potteries Hackspace group has been meeting almost every week throughout 2013 with the exception of the festive period, of course.

But we’re back! We’ll be open as normal on Tuesday 7th January (Tomorrow) at 7PM.

This year is set to be an interesting one for Potteries Hackspace. We’ve already got a few things lined up to get us going after the festive break.

Due to the success of the last Raspberry Jam at Newcastle College, there will be another on January 30th.

Also for 2014, we’ve got a challenge set.

Si said:

Hello Folks,
As you may remember, a little while ago I suggested we hold a line-following robot challenge at the end of December. Not sure if anyone has thought anymore about this so I thought I’d send out a post.

If you’re unaware what a line-follower is, its basically a small robot, normally 3 wheeled, that has light sensors underneath to detect a line on the floor, and follows it. Normally you’d have a row of sensors, so it can detect whether it has strayed off the line.

This should be a interesting and simple way for people to build a robot, and if a few of us do it, any problems should be overcome easily.

I’ve designed some motor driver PCBs if anyone wants one, they will drive 2 motors independently of each other in both directions from any 5V board, e.g. Arduino, and could be interfaced to a Pi with a bit of jiggery pokery. They are 5cm x 5cm and I’ve got about 5 spare, PCB and components run to about £10. Its mostly surface mount so should be a fun soldering challenge, or I can assemble them if its too daunting.

I’ll attach the schematic to this post, after the comp, they can be used to drive motors for other stuff, or a single stepper motor instead….

So who’s up for the challenge? The Gauntlet has been thrown…

Cheers

Si

You can read more about that on the Potteries Hackspace Google Group. We’re estimating a deadline for March. More information will follow once the details have been nailed down.

But that’s not all, some of our members have been busy working away on their own projects over the break which I’m sure they’ll be dying to show off.

In 4th place, we had Dave’s greenhouse system. Dave wasn’t able to attend and we struggled to get it working initially.

The idea was to automate a greenhouse, turning on or off various switches for water, light, opening vents and such depending on the input of temperature and water saturation sensors.

Unfortunately the screen wouldn’t turn on and we struggled to get the relay to switch on or off until after the demo.

In third place was the “MusicBox”. A system that booted up to load the Music Player Daemon (MPD), stream the playlist over Icecast and download new tracks released under the Creative Commons License, for commercial use from ccmixter using a scraper written in Python. The MPD allows you to remotely control it from your mobile phone or PC too.

The idea of the project is to circumvent license fees charged by companies such as PRS or PPL, which could potentially save a business thousands of pounds each year.

Given more time the project would have a voting system allowing you to easily drop the tracks you don’t like and replay the tracks you do more often. Giving you more control over what is played.

In second place, John had decommissioned his ferret web server to replace it with something a little more entertaining.

A Raspberry Pi based Arcade machine, running MAME and a Wii arcade controller with a USB converter.

It was hooked up over HDMI to a neat little display he’d managed to acquire for next to nothing which displayed the games beautifully.

All in all, it was lots of fun and probably because it was overclocked slightly more than is recommended, it ran the games very smoothly.

Impressive.

In first place was “The Beast”.

As it’s almost Halloween, this was definitely the most seasonal of the projects.

It comprises of a coffin, a former robot project, a Raspberry Pi and a speaker.

Once booted, you can SSH into the Raspberry Pi to control direction using the “old skool” W,A,S,D configuration and for the piece de la resistance, certain digits will play our various Halloween related sounds or tracks.

For effort alone, this thing wins hands down, but the fun factor really gave it the edge.

Well done guys!

Thanks again!

Thanks again to everyone that came down, especially the judges who took the time out of their business schedules and called in favours to make it down to our first ever competition.

Before the evening was over, we even managed to get Dave’s relay system up and running.